July 16, 2019
On Writing as Wish Fulfillment
I was in elementary school when I first started “writing” stories—I would take the Hot Wheels toy cars I’d collected since I was a toddler, name them all after my […]
October 11, 2017
Blade Runner 2049, Poetry, and Electric Sheep
In undertaking Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to Ridley Scott’s much-theorized 1982 cult classic Blade Runner, director Denis Villeneuve had some big shoes to fill. His shrewd move was […]
October 24, 2013
Tesseract Days
One of the many benefits of having a child is that I’m able to read and watch good stories on a regular basis. These stories are often short, and involve […]
October 11, 2013
Skyscrapers of Light
In 1938, Westinghouse buried a time capsule in a section of Queens described as a “valley of ashes” in The Great Gatsby. The time capsule was supposed to contain a […]
August 20, 2013
Café of the Future
The Long Now Foundation is hiring volunteers to curate their “Manual for Civilization,” a collection of 3500 volumes to be shelved in the Long Now Salon. Founded in “01996,” Long […]
August 12, 2012
Vidal, Bradbury, and misanthropic virtue
That people die, authors included, is no strange fact—but it is made strange by the deaths of authors so large they seem immovable, pillars of the craft exempt from time […]
August 7, 2012
On “Literary Fiction” and “Genre”
If you look at Wikipedia’s list of the bestselling fiction writers of all time, you’ll notice that the majority are English-language authors of the 20th century. So Barbara Cartland’s on […]
July 7, 2012
Two visions of the city
1. The City and the City by China Miéville. (Be advised: though I would not, some might think this description a tiny bit of a spoiler.) Two distinct city-states, Besźel […]
April 2, 2012
The Enduring Appeal of Jules Verne
If all Verne had done was predict the future, he would excite my admiration, not my love. How perspicacious the man was! Really ahead of his time! And that’s where […]
September 6, 2011
Short Takes: Crying and Laughing, or Both
A kind of poetic justice, in which an Ottawa prosecutor’s rhyme helped to convict an impaired driver in court. Plugged into Google Correlate (a tool which lets you free-draw graph […]